Oculus VR Inc., a trailblazer that put Orange County on the virtual reality map, has moved the last remnants of its local operation to Silicon Valley.
“Oculus no longer has an office in Irvine,” company spokesman Jim Redner confirmed to the Business Journal.
The move comes as a bit of a surprise, considering the company had long touted and leveraged the region’s software talent. Its operations here had nonetheless slowly dwindled after Facebook Inc. acquired the virtual reality headset maker in 2014 for $2 billion.
Oculus Chief Executive and co-founder Brandon Iribe told the Business Journal last year that the company planned to maintain a presence here despite challenges in recruiting local hardware engineers, particularly compared to Silicon Valley.
“We are committed to having offices in Orange County—a lot of [software] developers are still there,” Iribe, a Laguna Beach homeowner, said at the time.
Oculus had leased about 40,000 square feet at Newport Gateway, the two-tower office campus near the Irvine-Newport Beach city line, at the time of its sale to the Menlo Park social networking giant. Many of the 100 or so employees there became millionaires overnight, capping one of the most successful technology developments in Orange County’s history.
Its local presence had recently shrunk to about 10,000 square feet at the MacArthur Boulevard office complex, which housed a small team of software specialists.
The development comes about a year after Facebook opened its new 435,000-square-foot headquarters, which is expected to eventually house some 10,000 employees. The campus has outdoor cafes, barbecue pits, a noodle bar, climbing wall, spa, gaming arcade and other features.
Oculus has more than 110 job openings, many tied to research, and hardware and software development. Most of the positions are in Menlo Park, Seattle and Redmond, Wash.—home to Microsoft Inc.—but some are in the nontraditional tech hubs of Pittsburgh, Dallas and London.
Pittsburgh, however, is a well-established market for top-notch researchers, largely due to the talent and robotics expertise at Carnegie Mellon University.
Aliso Viejo-based 4K camera maker 360fly Inc., which recently raised $40 million in a Series C venture round, was founded in 1999 in a robotics lab at Carnegie Mellon.
Oculus’ large outpost in Seattle came with the 2014 acquisition of Carbon Design Group, a product design and engineering firm that developed the Xbox 360 controller and other PC, console and medical devices.
On the Cutting Edge
The company’s meteoric rise started humbly enough with a $2.4 million Kickstarter campaign in August 2012. Two venture capital funding rounds totaling $91 million moved the company from relative obscurity to one of the most watched in tech.
Its sale to Facebook was the first big deal in the emerging virtual reality segment, and helped co-founder Palmer Luckey earn a Business Person of the Year honor from the Business Journal.
The 23-year-old computer whiz honed his technical skills by day as an engineer in the Mixed Reality lab at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies, where he contributed to research and development of virtual reality systems and head-mounted displays.
By night, he tinkered with electronics at his parents’ Long Beach home, amassing the world’s largest collection of virtual reality headsets along the way and becoming an avid online forum participant, launching ModRetro.
It was in Long Beach that he upended the industry with the virtual reality optical technology he developed. The first crude model was essentially a dangling circuit board taped to a head strap, but it worked, immersing the user in a 360-degree environment.
Another version, made of plastic and fused together with hot glue, went on to ship about 60,000 units at $300 each. The so-called Crystal Cove model, which featured high-definition resolution, was a huge leap forward in innovation but still caused motion sickness, which has been largely resolved in newer updates.
The consumer version of the Oculus Rift was released in April. The latest headset—which includes custom displays, optic and tracking systems, an external sensor that plugs into a computer, two OLED screens, and a camera that tracks body movement and mimics it in the virtual world—costs about $600. Buyers need to purchase an Oculus Ready PC, which costs about $900, to gain the full immersive experience.
The device has garnered mixed reviews, and virtual reality has yet to live up to the hype, but Oculus’ influence in OC created a foundation here for others to follow.
Laguna Beach-based virtual content developer NextVR Inc. has carved a strong niche with live streaming broadcasts of sports and concerts, lining up partnerships with professional sports teams, leagues and major media companies.
Samsung’s headset, Gear VR, which was released late last year, is powered by Oculus and utilizes NextVR’s ultra-high-definition, 3-D virtual reality technology and content to create 360-degree videos.
Irvine-based Ready at Dawn was among the small roster of independent game developers that were launch partners for the Rift.
The company is led by Paul Sams, a 20-year veteran of Irvine-based Blizzard Entertainment Inc. who helped usher in a string of franchise hits at OC’s largest software maker.
